Summer Ghazal
by Judith Valente

The moment I felt I was alone in the world,
a leaf sauntered down from a chestnut tree as if craving earth.

A hummingbird flew overhead and a chipmunk darted beside my foot
as though searching for something, and exile from his home in the earth.

The hummingbird flaps its wings 720 times a minute, can fly
thirty-three miles, and also backward. No gravity can keep it earthbound.

My neighbor extracts her garden’s dandelions. They will grow in even
poisoned soil, likely still will be here when redwoods are no longer on the earth.

A secret too beautiful for people to look at, the astronaut said,
looking out from the space station, two hundred-fifty miles above earth.

The air is still. Ice caps melt at either pole, and oceans rise, extend each day
by a fraction of a millisecond. Enough to add a single day to my earthly life?

In romance languages, my name means valiant, but I am not brave, only
a quiet pilgrim content to amble upright and slowly on my small patch of earth.



 

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